The Girl With The Betty Davis Eyes-Well Bette Herself-Bette Davis And Franchot Tone’s “Dangerous” (1935)-A Film Review

The Girl With The Betty Davis Eyes-Well Bette Herself-Bette Davis And Franchot Tone’s “Dangerous” (1935)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Dangerous, starring Bette Davis, Franchot Tone, 1935  

  

Sam Lowell hates Bette Davis, Bette with the Bette Davis eyes as he was always fond of titling his film reviews when she was in play. Hates her despite his generally positive reviews of her films in her long career. Did a paean to her growing up in working class Lowell in Massachusetts as a companion piece about another Lowell native Jack Kerouac. Called her a channeling influence on Jean Bon out along the factory town on the Merrimack River. Sam’s gripe which I don’t particularly share is that after watching together (Sam and I are longtime companions) the film under review Dangerous he yelled out “What the hell she is playing the same theme as she in Jezebel and about twelve other movies.” Playing the untamed shrew, the bitch, the catty man grabber, the coquettish schoolgirl with a heart of stone, the vampish working class slut driving poor Leslie Howard crazy in Of Human Bondage and lots of stuff along that line. Even in films where she is playing a positive role like in All About Eve (in comparison to the gatecrasher Eve) and gullible Gabby in The Petrified Forest he says you are always waiting for her to pull the trigger and walk away without the slightest qualms. So says Sam. 

I think something else is going on though. Something that has nothing to do with Bette Davis as such but everything to do with his place in the dog eat dog film criticism world. Looking over his reviews here in the archives (and those from long ago when he was a free-lancer for American Film Gazette when he was younger and had just divorced his first wife and needed some serious alimony money) he certainly has changed his tune from calling her one of the great actresses of the American cinema. Called her role as Gabby plying her Petrified Forest naivete with her break out desires and Francois Villon poetic dreams electrifying.

What gives. Well what gives is something like one-ups-man-ship among “the boys.” The fraternity of film critics-who as Seth Garth pointed out in a recent review of one of the endless James Bond 007 flicks are worse than even the back-biters in the academy who have made a science of jockeying for position, of climbing up the food chain over the literary dead bodies, who knows maybe literal too, of their colleagues. So it is about staking “turf” in that milieu of not being seen as too obliging when taking swipes at the film being reviewed- or another reviewer’s take on that same film. Add in that Sam has “retired” from the day to day grind of reviewing films and has become the occasional contributor and probably feels he needs to make each contribution stick out against the rest of the fraternity.        

As far as I can tell the whole business started when David Stein from American Film Gazette lambasted Phil Larkin for fawning over one of the Marvel Comics cinematic productions like a twelve year old. (Don’t ask me which one but I think it was one where all the Marvel characters ganged up on the bad guys.) That stiffened Phil’s back when he started doing reviews of the James Bond 007 series and came out swinging in defense of original screen Bond Sean Connery as the ultimate expression of the role. Did that in reaction to Will Bradley’s partisanship of what Phil called Pierce Brosnan’s pretty boy take. Even got staid Seth Garth who likes to think he is taking the intellectual high road in his reviews down in the mud for being wishy-washy. They are still duking it out with no holds barred.

Along that same line, and maybe something that has also egged on all these boys, is Bruce Conan’s attempts to rip up the Sherlock Holmes legend. Bruce Conan not his real name but a pseudonym since he claims that his torrid exposes have made him and his family vulnerable to some international criminal cartel called either the Kit Kat Club or the Baker Street Irregulars I am never sure which is threatening him and his which is totally dedicated to keeping Holmes memory unsullied. I can see why he feels the need of an on-line moniker since not only has he raked Holmes (whose real name is Lanny Lamont according to Bruce) and his companion Doc Watson of being total amateurs and frauds but has done the very politically incorrect thing these days of “outing” the pair as closet homosexuals. That is the kind of stuff the boys are creating gathering storms over. Who knows where it will end but more than one reputation will fall under the bus.         

But enough of that since the average reader probably now knows infinitely more than they need to know about the inner workings of the catfight aura of the profession. As I mentioned I did not, do not share Sam’s estimation of Bette Davis, certainly not in the role here which won her an Oscar, of a high-strung faded falling down drunk actress Joyce Heath who is nothing but poison to anyone she touches (stage actress of course in the days they called that the legitimate theater to distinguish it from the muck coming out of Hollywood). The victim on screen this time is Don Bellows, played by Franchot Tone, an up and coming New York architect with plenty of promise and a certain amount of naivete or need for living dangerously on the edge-take your pick. Also very engaged to a scion of a Mayfair swell family.    

After picking Joyce up from a gin mill the action that will seemingly seal his fallen fate begins as he starts to fall for her after she has used every trick in her playbook to hook him. It is always touch and go about whether she loves him or just sees him as a plaything. Most of the time it seem she has outsmarted herself and really does love him. Especially as Don is the key agent for her return to Broadway and fame in a big time role. Things get tricky though when after throwing over that Mayfair swell dame he, square guy that he is, insists that they get married right away. Monkey wrench, big monkey wrench, our Joyce is already unhappily married to a still smitten holy goof (Sam’s term). Things come to an impasse when her hubby refuses to let her go and she thereafter crashes them into a tree in a suicide attempt. They both recover but the bloom is off the rose when Don finds out what is what. Here is where I don’t get Sam’s ire. Joyce seeing that she has been selfish and self-serving accepts her fate and lets Don go (in her head, he was already gone in his, gone to his old Mayfair swell dish) and goes on to her bright stage career and caring for her husband who was severely injured in that crash. What’s wrong with that.     

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- *Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor "Big Bill" Haywood

Click on the title to link to an online biography of "Big Bill" Haywood.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

*****

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts
contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

Markin comment:

I have mentioned before when I have highlighted the career of this early 20th radical labor leader that the current labor leadership, at least at the top, has produced no one of Big Bill's quality. Maybe somewhere down in the ranks, not now visible, there are Big Bill wannabes waiting for their turns. If so, get to it.

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman” (1943)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman” (1943)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Bruce Conan

[Well I am still standing although it has been a close thing of late, a very close thing. But even if I don’t make it to the end, the end being finishing up the twelve, no fourteen, damn films that were made about the fraudulent so-called deductive reasoning amateur private detective Sherlock Holmes’ legend, then I will at least have gotten this very important review out to the previously fawning public. Despite endless harassment and threats to me and my family who I have now twice had to move for their own protection from a nefarious organization, a cult really, calling itself the Baker Street Irregulars I finally have the proof I need to debunk an important aspect of the legend. The film under review, The Spider Woman, will put paid to my important contention that Sherlock Holmes, aka as Basil Rathbone but whose real name is Lanny Lamont which is the name I will use for the rest of this review and his boon companion Doc, Doc Watson, were lovers, were to use a word from the time “light on their feet,” committed “the love that dare not speak its name” for then obvious reasons that it was a high crime in Merry Olde England. If you don’t believe me just ask famed playwright Oscar Wilde or more recently code-cracker Allan Turing. 

A lot of the charges which I have hurled at the Lamont legend (remember aka Sherlock) about his abilities as a private detective can be considered somewhat inconsequential. For example, Lanny’s inability to shoot and hit the side of a barn when pursuing dead ass criminals, his letting the bodies pile up due to his inane bone-headed adherent to deductive reasoning when even a rank kid P.I. knows for dead certain that murder, murder one, murder most foul has no such rhyme or reason and his inevitably letting others face danger and grab the miscreants. But for private detectives of his era the failure to pursue and bed the most hardened femme fatale due to his preference for men, for bumbling Doc Watson is fatal to his legend. Proves beyond a doubt that he is a fake and a fraud. I have used the examples of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade who went down on the pillows with one of the most gun-simple femmes around, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe to make my case. Enough said.       

I have been accused, mercilessly accused, of being anti-gay, homophobic, a Neanderthal, politically incorrect and a million other things in a smear campaign which I believe has been orchestrated by the denizens of the Kit Kat Club, a homosexual club that has been around since the days of King George III and my discovery that Lanny and Doc were member was one of the first pieces of hard evidence for my decisive claims. These men are also part and parcel of the more broad based Irregulars, a band of bandits and desperadoes who have been plaguing the citizenry of London with their criminal activities from robbery to dope, maybe murder if we ever find out the facts about a lot of bodies that have washed up from the Thames over the years are committed to claiming Lanny and Doc publically to the Homintern. These cultists have gone out of their way to malign me and my discoveries by those simple anti-gay charges. That despite my well-known, this space’s well-known early support for LBGTQ rights, support for same-sex marriage when that was nothing but a dream over a decade ago (although being on marriage number three I am not sure if that will work out any better than in my case but good luck), and a stellar defense of heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower and Trans advocate Chelsea Manning.   

If say one of today’s famous private detectives Lance Lawton came out of the closet and said he was gay or Tran or whatever I, and I hope everybody and their sister would agree we would yawn, could care less and good luck. But back in the day, back in the heroic age of the private detective a right of passage was to go mano a mano with some dangerous woman, better women, hit the sack (real or implied as was the case on the screen), and personally sent them over to the law a la Sam Spade or forget them and move on to the next dangerous woman. Simple, case closed]  

*****

Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman, starring Basil Rathbone (I have mentioned previously my doubts that this was his real name since unlike myself he had never been transparent enough to say that he had been using an alias. I have since uncovered information that I was generally right and found at first that his real name was Lytton Strachey a known felon who spent a few years in Dartmoor Prison on weapons and drug trafficking charges. It turns out that I was either in error or the victim of a cyber-attack since then it has come out that his real name was not Strachey but Lanny Lamont, who worked the wharfs and water-side dive taverns where the rough trade mentioned by Jean Genet in his classic rough trade expose Our Lady of the Flowers did hard-edged tricks), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who also did time at Dartmoor for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I had assumed he and Lanny had met up. Again a cyber-attack error they had met at the Whip and Chain tavern at dockside Thames while Lanny was doing his business on the sailor boys), 1943 

I first mentioned publically my suspicions about fraudulent Lanny’s preference (after much research especially that decisive membership in the Kit Kat Club) in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon where Lanny and this good-looking young woman were trapped together in a room after Lanny had been captured by a bad guy and the young woman had been kidnapped since she probably had the formula to the secret weapon of the title. Lanny made no play, didn’t even look at her the whole time they were captivity. Proof positive he was sailing under a false flag. This Spider Woman saga is the definitive proof.          

The story sets up that an unnaturally large number of prominent and wealthy men in London are committing suicide with no explanation for the spike. Lanny faking as usual his disdain for what is happening while on vacation up in Scotland fakes his death after having a tiff with Doc causing the good doctor in an unmanly manner to bubble over in tears and head back to London to settle Lanny’s estate. Suddenly Lanny comes back to life and all is forgiven by Doc who is glad as hell to see him. Lanny’s ruse was allegedly so he could smoke out the murderer of that pile of wealthy guys, a murderer who could only be a woman by Lanny’s lights (and just another example of his contempt for women). The hounding and pursuit of some woman to take the fall against all other possibilities drives the rest of the disgusting story.     

Naturally Lanny has to set a trap, a trap involving himself at first once he figured out that this woman, this good-looking femme gang leader is using a life policy scam to kill these guys who may have been wealthy at one time but whose gambling had led them down the primrose path (although you know in the end that he will fall down, will let the real coppers of the corruption-filled Scotland Yard, coppers these days who have bungled the investigation of the whole Baker Street Irregulars crime spree). Further investigation shows that the method used dastardly for sure was to use an immune pygmy to set a deadly spider on each victims’ premises. Nice right. Sherlock temporarily falls into the femme hands but escapes in terror and let’s Scotland Yard as expected close the operation down. I can’t let this one go without mentioning Sam or Phillip would have bedded her, would have headed toward the danger and then dropped her like a hot potato.      

NAFTA/USMCA Down With U.S. Pillage of Mexico! No to Protectionism!

[American Left History publishes or re-publishes articles and notices of events that might be of interest to the liberal, left-liberal and radical public. That has been the policy generally since the publication due to financial constraints went solely on-line in the early 2000s as the Internet has allowed new and simply outlets for all kinds of material that were almost impossible to publish when it was solely hard copy going back to the early 1970s.

Over the past couple of months American Left History has received many comments about our policy of publishing materials and notices of events without comment. More than a few comments wondered aloud whether the publication agreed with all, or most of what has been published. Obviously given that we will republish material from sources like the ACLU, the movement for nuclear disarmament and established if small left-wing organizations formally outside the main party system in America unless we were mere by-standers to the political movements many of the positions are too contrary to agree with all of them.   

Policy: unless there is a signed statement of agreement by one of our writers, me or the Editorial Board assume that the article or notice is what we think might be of interest of the Left-wing public and does not constitute and endorsement. Greg Green, site manager]    

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Workers Vanguard No. 1149	22 February 2019

NAFTA/USMCA

Down With U.S. Pillage of Mexico!

No to Protectionism!

Last November, Donald Trump was joined by the leaders of Canada and Mexico in signing an update to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). For 25 years, NAFTA has served as a key tool in the economic plunder of Mexico by the imperialist U.S. and its Canadian junior partner, laying waste to the countryside and brutally exploiting Mexico’s working class. The new version of NAFTA—in the U.S. dubbed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)—will, if ratified by lawmakers in all three countries, enable the U.S. ruling class to squeeze ever more superprofits out of the Mexican proletariat, while also undercutting the economic viability of Canadian small farmers.

The NAFTA agreement finalized by Democratic president Bill Clinton wiped out the livelihoods of a great mass of poor rural workers, peasants and others in Mexico, as technologically advanced, highly productive and subsidized U.S. agribusiness gained unfettered access to its markets. Before NAFTA, Mexico was largely self-sufficient in food production, but by 2014 it had become a net importer of food, buying much of its corn, meat, dairy products, eggs and poultry from the U.S. In addition, NAFTA was a great impetus to the explosive growth of the maquiladora industry and set off a wave of union-busting, wage-gouging and privatizations of nationalized industry demanded by the U.S. imperialists. In the U.S. and Canada, the NAFTA era has seen an intensification of the bosses’ war on unions and social benefits.

We have opposed NAFTA from its inception. As it was being negotiated in 1991, the Spartacist League/U.S., Grupo Espartaquista de México and Trotskyist League of Canada (now the Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada) issued a joint statement titled: “Stop U.S. ‘Free Trade’ Rape of Mexico” (see WV No. 530, 5 July 1991). It declared: “There is a burning need for an internationalist proletarian opposition which stands with the working class and impoverished peasantry of Mexico against the imperialist assault. The Canadian, U.S. and Mexican sections of the International Communist League are dedicated to building a revolutionary vanguard that can unite the working masses of the continent in common class struggle.”

In contrast, U.S. labor officialdom, in concert with Trump and many Democrats, opposes NAFTA from a position of chauvinist protectionism. The union bureaucrats promote the lie of a commonality of interests between the U.S. working class and the capitalist rulers. In fact, the profits of this country’s capitalists are derived from exploiting both U.S. and foreign workers. By waving the flag of “America first” protectionism, the union tops treacherously set workers in this country against their Mexican, English Canadian and Québécois class brothers and sisters. The scapegoating of foreign workers for the loss of jobs in the U.S. also fosters anti-immigrant prejudices. Against attempts to pit native-born and immigrant workers against each other, which can only benefit the bosses, we say: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations!

The purpose of NAFTA was to increase the flagging competitiveness of U.S. imperialism against its main rivals, Germany and Japan. The modern capitalist world is characterized by the export of capital. A handful of imperialist powers carved out spheres of exploitation, including markets and sources of cheap labor, which they compete to redivide, a process described by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin in his classic work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).

NAFTA/USMCA and other imperialist trade blocs, such as the German-dominated European Union (EU), which the ICL opposes on principle, are reactionary attempts by the great powers to get a leg up on their adversaries. The push by Washington to revise NAFTA and to impose other protectionist measures comes amid the continued relative economic decline of the United States, which still dominates the globe militarily. The USMCA proposes to increase the percentage of auto components that must be sourced from within the territory covered by the agreement. This provision is aimed at U.S. imperialism’s competitors in Europe and Japan as well as China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Already, Trump has launched a trade war with China and is threatening one with the EU. As history shows, trade wars lead to shooting wars.

Trade-Union Tops Spew Protectionist Poison

The USMCA has yet to go before Congress, but many Democrats have already voiced opposition, primarily on the basis that it is not protectionist enough. False “friends of labor” in the Democratic Party, joined by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a darling of the left, wrap their protectionist prescriptions in talk of “strong enforcement mechanisms” for supposed labor and environmental protections. The labor bureaucrats have been singing the same fraudulent tune, adding a hypocritical veneer of concern for poorly paid Mexican workers. One so-called worker protection in the new NAFTA that the union tops want strictly enforced is a provision that 40 percent of a car’s components be manufactured in plants where workers make at least $16 an hour—over four times the current average wage of Mexican auto workers. The concern, though, is not to get Mexican workers better wages but to get Mexican jobs shipped to the U.S.

While the free flow of U.S. capital has wreaked havoc in Mexico, it has simultaneously enhanced the size and potential social power of the Mexican proletariat. The further integration of North American production under NAFTA has increased the opportunities and necessity for united class struggle of workers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Witness the massive strike wave that has swept through the maquiladoras in Matamoros and is extending into neighboring cities (see article, page 1). Many of these factories produce parts or do assembly work for General Motors, Ford and other automakers; the strikes idled at least one Ford assembly plant in Canada and threatened production at others.

The strikes in Matamoros come on the heels of the announcement by GM that it will close five plants in Ohio, Michigan, Maryland and Ontario, Canada, throwing thousands of unionized auto workers out on the streets. Militant action by U.S. workers alongside their Mexican and Canadian class allies against the auto bosses is urgently posed. Criminally, the United Auto Workers misleaders, along with Canada’s Unifor union bureaucrats, are calling to boycott GM cars assembled in Mexico! So much for improving the lot of Mexican workers.

The upper echelons of the AFL-CIO chastise some Mexican unions for not being sufficiently independent from the bosses. That’s rich! The U.S. union bureaucrats preach a false partnership of labor and capital and abject reliance on the Democratic Party, of which they form a key part. Bought off with crumbs left over from U.S. imperialist pillage, these labor lieutenants of capital police the unions to head off class struggle. They have presided over decades of giveback contracts, wage cuts, the proliferation of tiers and the wholesale erosion of the unions, barely lifting a finger to organize the unorganized.

The AFL-CIO tops have a sordid history of serving as direct agents of the U.S. imperialists. During the Cold War, the U.S. labor bureaucracy worked with the CIA in Latin America to destroy militant, left-led unions and helped engineer right-wing coups. In 2002, the international arm of the AFL-CIO had a hand in the attempted coup in Venezuela against then-president Hugo Chávez, including by channeling CIA funds to the coup plotters.

Revitalizing the unions as militant battalions of the multiracial working class requires a fight to forge a class-struggle leadership, independent of and in opposition to the capitalists and their political parties. Break with the Democrats! For a revolutionary workers party!

Workers Revolution Will Sweep Away Imperialism

The USMCA also provides the U.S. rulers a new weapon in their counterrevolutionary drive against China, the most powerful remaining country where capitalism has been overthrown. One clause allows the U.S. to pull out of the accord if a signatory pursues a separate trade agreement with a “nonmarket country,” giving Washington a veto over Canada or Mexico negotiating a pact with China.

China is a workers state, albeit deformed from its inception since it has been ruled by a parasitic Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy rather than organs of workers democracy. The 1949 Chinese Revolution, led by Mao’s peasant-based army, expropriated the capitalists and landlords and liberated the world’s most populous country from imperialist subjugation. Behind the U.S. trade war with Beijing is the goal, shared by Republicans and Democrats alike, of destroying the Chinese deformed workers state and restoring capitalist rule there.

It is in the interest of the international proletariat to defend China against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. The ruling bureaucratic caste must be ousted through a proletarian political revolution that establishes a regime based on workers democracy and committed to the fight for world socialism.

Another new element in the USMCA is the elimination of Canadian tariffs on a higher amount of U.S. dairy imports, after Trump made opposition to them a battle cry. Granting American dairy interests freer access will almost certainly result in the ruination of many Canadian small dairy farmers, the majority of whom are concentrated in nationally oppressed Quebec. The slashing of these tariffs is overwhelmingly opposed in Quebec. But since Quebec has no national sovereignty, negotiation of the USMCA was carried out by the Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie, which did not hesitate to sacrifice Québécois dairy and other farmers in hopes of securing Ontario’s auto industry. This underscores the need to struggle against the national oppression of Quebec, which can be a motor force for workers revolution. The ICL fights for Quebec independence and working-class rule.

The U.S. rulers have long oppressed Mexico, including stealing half its territory in the 19th century. A workers government in the U.S. would return to Mexico certain contiguous regions, predominantly Spanish-speaking, of the Southwest that were seized from Mexico in the 1846-48 Mexican-American War. Specifically, the region between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande/Río Bravo will be given back. This land was falsely claimed by Texas after it signed the Treaties of Velasco and seceded from Mexico in 1836. Such a territorial transfer would send a powerful message that U.S. workers in power repudiate the chauvinism of the previous ruling class, bolstering support for proletarian revolution throughout the hemisphere. The International Communist League, in our fight to reforge Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International, seeks to construct the communist parties that are necessary to lead those revolutions.

In Honor Of Women's History Month- Lucy On The Edge Of The World

In Honor Of Women's History Month- Lucy On The Edge Of The World

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman   

People, ordinary night owls, strung out on bennie or cousin coke and coming the hours until day break and sun, hung-over sotted refugees from the now closed bars and cabarets filled with cheap liquors and quaffed beers, average sainted vagabond Saint Francis of Assisi dream  wanderers of the Harvard Square night, the shiftless watch out for dark alleys when they stalk the benighted earth, the toothless homeless, coming into the all-night Hayes-Bickford seeking, like him,  relief from their collective woes with a cup of weak-kneed coffee from the giant spouted tureen all aglow from the cloudburst above trailing off to the chipped paint ceiling which only those looking to some misbegotten heaven paid attention, and steamed, steamed carrots, potatoes, broccoli, celery, steamed everything, did not bother Lucy (the first name Lucy was all anybody ever found out about her name as far as he knew) sitting alone at her “reserved” table in the back of the cafeteria toward the well-abused rest rooms. Lucy Lilac (nicknamed by some ancient want-to-be fellow bard perhaps but like her surname the genesis undisclosed to him by the other regular tenants of the night when he asked around and so he called her by that moniker as well) spent her youthful (she was perhaps twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, had just finished college, he had heard, so that age seemed about right) middle of the nights just then hunched over a yellow legal notepad filling up its pages with her writings and occasionally she would speak some tidbit she had written out loud, not harmful offensive so you prayed for shut ears, a well-placed handkerchief in mouth, a metaphorical gun, loud like some of the drunks at a few of the tables, or some homeless wailing banshee cry, but just sing-song out loud.

Some of it was beautiful, and some of it was, well, doggerel, about par  for the course with poets and other writers, But all of it, whatever he heard of it, was centered on her plight in the world as a woman torn, as a woman on the edge, the edge between two societies, between as one professor that he had asked about it later stated it, two cultural gradients if that term has any meaning, and maybe she had been, had been between those two cultural gradients,  but let him try to reconstruct what it was all about, all about for Lucy Lilac night owl.

See he became so fascinated by where she was going with her muse in 1962 summer nights, about how she was going to resolve that battle between “cultural gradients” and about the gist of what she had to say to a callow world in those days that he turned up many a two in morning weekend morning to try to figure her dream out. He had more than a passing interest in this battle since he was also spooked by those same demons that she spoke of.    

[Oh, by the way, Lucy Lilac, was drop-dead beautiful, with long black iron-pressed straight hair as was the style then after the folk singer Joan Baez, her sister Mimi and Judy Collins set the pace and the Square and college air was filled singed smells, alabaster white skin whether from her daylight hours of  sleep or by genetic design was not clear, big red lips, which he did not remember whether was the style then or not, the bluest eyes of blue, always wearing dangling earrings and usually wearing some long dress so it was never really possible to determine her figure or her legs important pieces of knowledge to him, and not just to him, in those sex-obsessed  days, but he would have said slender and probably nice legs too. Since neither her beauty, nor the idea of sex, at least pick-up sex, enter into this sketch that is all that needs to be pointed out. Except this, her beauty, along with that no-nonsense demeanor, was so apparent that it held him, and others too, off from anything other than an occasional distant forlorn smile. ]               

What Lucy Lilac would speak of, like a lot of the young in those days, was her alienation from parents, society, just everything to keep it simple, but not just that. On that she had kindred spirits in abundance.  She was also alienated from her race, her white race, her nine to five, go by the rules, we are in charge, trample on the rest of the world, especially the known black world, like lot of  the young, him included, were in those days as well.  Part of it was that you could not turn open a newspaper or turn on a radio or television without having the ugly stuff going down South in America (and sometimes stuff in the North too confronting you headlong). But part of it was an affinity with black culture (the gradient, okay), mainly through music and a certain style, a certain swagger in the face of a world filled with hostility. Cool, to use just one word. 

Now this race thing, this white race thing of Lucy’s had nothing to do, he did not think, at least when she spoke never came through, with some kind of guilt by association with the rednecks and crackers down in places like Alabama and Mississippi goddams. It was more that given the deal going down in the world, the injustices, the not having had any say in what was going on, or being asked either made her feel like she was some Negro in some shack some place. Some mad priestess fellaheena scratching the good earth to make her mark. And as she expanded her ideas (and began to get a little be-bop flow as she spoke, a flow that he secretly kept time to), each night he got a better sense of what she was trying to say. (He later learned that she was, as he had been, very influenced by Norman Mailer’s essay in The Partisan Review The White Negro, a screed on what he called the white hipster, those who had parted company with their own culture and moved to the sexier, sassy cultural gradient.) And while they both were comfortably ensconced in the cozy Cambridge Hayes (well maybe not cozy but safe anyway) and had some very white skin to not have Mister James Crow worry about he began to see what she meant.

And Lucy Lilac really hit home when she spoke of how she had, to his surprise since she gave every indication of being some cast-off Mayfair swell’s progeny, minus that important race thing, been brought up under some tough circumstances down in New Jersey. She spoke about being from poor, very poor white folks somewhere around Toms River, her father out of work a lot worrying about the next paycheck and keeping him and his under some roof, her mother harried by taking care of five kids on two kids money, about being ostracized by the other better off kids, about seeking solace in listening to Bessie Smith, Billie, and a ton of other blues names that he recognized. And he too recognized fellahin kindred since his own North Adamsville existence seemed so similar ….

Yes, those nights he knit a secret and unknown bond with Lucy Lilac, Lucy who a few months later vanished from the Hayes-Bickford night, Lucy from the edge of the world, and wherever she wound he knew just what she meant by the white Negro hipster-dom she was seeking, and that maybe he was too…

And hence this Women’s History Month contribution.

HONOR THE MEMORY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE!

HONOR THE MEMORY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE!

Click on title to link to online "Paris Commune Archives".


http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ANARCHIST_ARCHIVES/pariscommune/Pariscommunearchive.html

COMMENTARY

March 18th is the Anniversary of the Paris Commune. All honor to the men and women who fought to the death to defend this first beacon of working class revolution.

I would like make a few comments in honor of the heroic Communards.

When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. However, one can learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.

BELOW IS A TRIBUTE TO THE PARIS COMMUNE WRITTEN BY THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTIONARY LEON TROTSKY IN RUSSIAN IN 1921 AND LATER TRANSLATED IN THE JOURNAL NEW INTERNATIONAL OF MARCH 1935, VOL. 2, NO.2

LESSONS OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

EACH TIME that we study the history of the Commune we see it from a new aspect, thanks to the experience acquired by the later revolutionary struggles and above all by the latest revolutions, not only the Russian but the German and Hungarian revolutions. The Franco-German war was a bloody explosion, harbinger of an immense world slaughter, the Commune of Paris a lightning harbinger of a world proletarian revolution.

The Commune shows us the heroism of the working masses, their capacity to unite into a single bloc, their talent to sacrifice themselves in the name of the future, but at the same time it shows us the incapacity of the masses to choose their path, their indecision in the leadership of the movement, their fatal penchant to come to a halt after the first successes, thus permitting the enemy to regain its breath, to reestablish its position.

The Commune came too late. It had all the possibilities of taking the power on September 4 and that would have permitted the proletariat of Paris to place itself at a single stroke at the head of the workers of the country in their struggle against all the forces of the past, against Bismarck as well as against Thiers. But the power fell into the hands of the democratic praters, the deputies of Paris. The Parisian proletariat had neither a party, nor leaders to whom it would have been closely bound by previous struggles. The petty bourgeois patriots who thought themselves socialists and sought the support of the workers did not really have any confidence in themselves. They shook the proletariat's faith in itself, they were continually in quest of celebrated lawyers, of journalists, of deputies, whose baggage consisted only of a dozen vaguely revolutionary phrases, in order to entrust them with the leadership of the movement.

The reason why Jules Favre, Picard, Gamier-Pages and Co. took power in Paris on September 4 is the same as that which permitted Pall-Boncour, A. Varenne, Renaudel and numerous others to be for a time the masters of the party of the proletariat. The Renaudels and the Boncours and even the Longuets and the Pressemanes are much closer, by virtue of their sympathies, their intellectual habits and their conduct, to the Jules Favres and the Jules Ferrys than to the revolutionary proletariat. Their socialist phraseology is nothing but an historic mask which permits them to impose themselves upon the masses. And it is just because Favre, Simon, Picard and the others used and abused a democratico-liberal phraseology that their sons and their grandsons are obliged to resort to a socialist phraseology. But the sons and the grandsons have remained worthy of their fathers and continue their work. And when it will be necessary to decide not the question of the composition of a ministerial clique but the much more important question of knowing what class in France must take power, Renaudel, Varenne, Longuet and their similars will be in the camp of Millerand-collaborator of Galliffet, the butcher of the Commune .... When the revolutionary babblers of the salons and of parliament find themselves face to face, in real life, with the revolution, they never recognize it.

The workers' party-the real one-is not a machine for parliamentary manoeuvres, it is the accumulated and organized experience of the proletariat. It is only with the aid of the party, which rests upon the whole history of its past, which foresees theoretically the paths of development, all its stages, and which extracts from it the necessary formula of action, that the proletariat frees itself from the need of always recommencing its history: its hesitations, its lack of decision, its mistakes.

The proletariat of Paris did not have such a party. The bourgeois socialists with whom the Commune swarmed, raised their eyes to heaven, waited for a miracle or else a prophetic word, hesitated, and during that time the masses groped about and lost their heads because of the indecision of some and the fantasy of others. The result was that the revolution broke out in their very midst, too late, and Paris was encircled. Six months elapsed before the proletariat had reestablished in its memory the lessons of past revolutions, of battles of yore, of the reiterated betrayals of democracy-and it seized power.

These six months proved to be an irreparable loss. If the centralized party of revolutionary action had been found at the head of the proletariat of France in September 1870, the whole history of France and with it the whole history of humanity would have taken another direction.If the power was found in the hands of the proletariat of Paris on March 18, it was not because it had been deliberately seized, but because its enemies had quitted Paris.

These latter were losing ground continuously, the workers despised and detested them, the petty bourgeoisie no longer had confidence in them and the big bourgeoisie feared that they were no longer capable of defending it. The soldiers were hostile to the officers. The government fled Paris in order to concentrate its forces elsewhere. And it was then that the proletariat became master of the situation.
But it understood this fact only on the morrow. The revolution fell upon it unexpectedly.

This first success was a new source of passivity. The enemy had fled to Versailles. Wasn't that a victory? At that moment the governmental band could have been crushed almost without the spilling of blood. In Paris, all the ministers, with Thiers at their head, could have been taken prisoner. Nobody would have raised a hand to defend them. It was not done. There was no organization of a centralized party, having a rounded view of things and special organs for realizing its decisions.

The debris of the infantry did not want to fall back to Versailles. The thread which tied the officers and the soldiers was pretty tenuous. And had there been a directing party center at Paris, it would have incorporated into the retreating armies-since there was the possibility of retreating-a few hundred or even a few dozen devoted workers, and given them the following instructions: enhance the discontent of the soldiers against the officers, profit by the first favorable psychological moment to free the soldiers from their officers and bring them back to Paris to unite with the people. This could easily have been realized, according to the admissions of Thiers' supporters themselves. Nobody even thought of it. Nor was there anybody to think of it. In the midst of great events, moreover, such decisions can be adopted only by a revolutionary party which looks forward to a revolution, prepares for it, does not lose its head, by a party which is accustomed to having a rounded view and is not afraid to act.

And a party of action is just what the French proletariat did not have.

The Central Committee of the National Guard is in effect a Council of Deputies of the armed workers and the petty bourgeoisie. Such a Council, elected directly by the masses who have taken the revolutionary road, represents an excellent apparatus of action. But at the same time, and just because of its immediate and elementary connection with the masses who are in the state in which the revolutionary has found them, it reflects not only all the strong sides but also the weak sides of the masses, and it reflects at first the weak sides still more than it does the strong: it manifests the spirit of indecision, of waiting, the tendency to be inactive after the first successes.

The Central Committee of the National Guard needed to be led. It was indispensable to have an organization incarnating the political experience of the proletariat and always present-not only in the Central Committee, but in the legions, in the battalion, in the deepest sectors of the French proletariat. By means of the Councils of Deputies-in the given case they were organs of the National Guard-the party could have been in continual contact with the masses, known their state of mind; its leading center con! I each day put forward a slogan which, through the medium of the party's militants, would have penetrated into the masses, uniting their thought and their will.

Hardly had the government fallen back to Versailles than the National Guard hastened to unload its responsibility, at the very moment when this responsibility was enormous. The Central Committee imagined "legal" elections to the Commune. It entered into negotiations with the mayors of Paris in order to cover itself, from the Right, with "legality".

Had a violent attack been prepared against Versailles at the same time, the negotiations with the mayors would have been a ruse fully justified from the military standpoint and in conformity with the goal. But in reality, these negotiations were being conducted only in order to avert the struggle by some miracle or other. The petty bourgeois radicals and the socialistic idealists, respecting "legality" and the men who embodied a portion of the "legal" state-the deputies, the mayors, etc.-hoped at the bottom of their souls that Thiers would halt respectfully before revolutionary Paris the minute the latter covered itself with the "legal" Commune.

Passivity and indecision were supported in this case by the sacred principle of federation and autonomy. Paris, you see, is only one commune among many other communes. Paris wants to impose nothing upon anyone; it does not struggle for the dictatorship, unless it be for the 'dictatorship of example".

In sum, it was nothing but an attempt to replace the proletarian revolution, which was developing, by a petty bourgeois reform: communal autonomy. The real revolutionary task consisted of assuring the proletariat the power all over the country. Paris had to serve as its base, its support, its stronghold. And to attain this goal, it was necessary to vanquish Versailles without the loss of time and to send agitators, organizers, and armed forces throughout France. It was necessary to enter into contact with sympathizers, to strengthen the hesitators and to shatter the opposition of the adversary. Instead of this policy of offensive and aggression which was the only thing that could save the situation, the leaders of Paris attempted to seclude themselves in their communal autonomy: they will not attack the others if the others do not attack them; each town has its sacred right of self-government. This idealistic chatter-of the same gender as mundane anarchism covered up in reality a cowardice in face of revolutionary action which should have been conducted incessantly up to the very end, for otherwise it should not have been begun.

The hostility to capitalist organization-a heritage of petty bourgeois localism and autonomism-is without a doubt the weak side of a certain section of the French proletariat. Autonomy for the districts, for the wards, for the battalions, for the towns, is the supreme guarantee of real activity and individual independence for certain revolutionists. But that is a great mistake which cost the French proletariat dearly.

Under the form of the "struggle against despotic centralism" and against "stifling" discipline, a fight takes place for the self preservation of various groups and sub-groupings of the working class, for their petty interests, with their petty ward leaders and their local oracles. The entire working class, while preserving its cultural originality and its political nuances, can act methodically and firmly, without remaining in the tow of events, and directing each time its mortal blows against the weak sectors of its enemies, on the condition that at its head, above the wards, the districts, the groups, there is an apparatus which is centralized and bound together by an iron discipline. The tendency towards particularism, whatever the form it may assume, is a heritage of the dead past. The sooner French communist-socialist communism and syndicalist communism-emancipates itself from it, the better it will be for the proletarian revolution.

The party does not create the revolution at will, it does not choose the moment for seizing power as it likes, but it intervenes actively in the events, penetrates at every moment the state of mind of the revolutionary masses and evaluates the power of resistance of the enemy, and thus determines the most favorable moment for decisive action. This is the most difficult side of its task. The party has no decision that is valid for every case. Needed are a correct theory, an intimate contact with the masses, the comprehension of the situation, a revolutionary perception, a great resoluteness. The more profoundly a revolutionary party penetrates into all the domains of the proletarian struggle, the more unified it is by the unity of goal and discipline, the speedier and better will it arrive at resolving its task.

The difficulty consists in having this organization of a centralized party, internally welded by an iron discipline, linked intimately with the movement of the masses, with its ebbs and flows. The conquest of power cannot be achieved save on the condition of a powerful revolutionary pressure of the toiling masses. But in this act the element of preparation is entirely inevitable. The better the party will understand the conjuncture and the moment, the better the bases of resistance will be prepared, the better the force and the roles will be distributed, the surer will be the success and the less victims will it cost. The correlation of a carefully prepared action and a mass movement is the politico-strategical task of the taking of power.

The comparison of March 18, 1871 with November 7, 1917 is very instructive from this point of view. In Paris, there is an absolute lack of initiative for action on the part of the leading revolutionary circles. The proletariat, armed by the bourgeois government, is in reality master of the town, has all the material means of power-cannon and rifles-at its disposal, but it is not aware of it. The bourgeoisie makes an attempt to retake the weapon of the giant: it wants to steal the cannon of the proletariat. The attempt fails. The government flees in panic from Paris to Versailles. The field is clear. But it is only on the morrow that the proletariat understands that it is the master of Paris. The "leaders" are in the wake of events, they record them when the latter are already accomplished, and they do everything in their power to blunt the revolutionary edge.

In Petrograd, the events developed differently. The party moved firmly, resolutely, to the seizure of power, having its men everywhere, consolidating each position, extending every fissure between the workers and the garrison on the one side and the government on the other.

The armed demonstration of the July days is a vast reconnoitering conducted by the party to sound the degree of close contact between the masses and the power of resistance of the enemy. The reconnoitering is transformed into a struggle of outposts. We are thrown back, but at the same time the action establishes a connection between the party and the depths of the masses. The months of August, September and October see a powerful revolutionary flux. The party profits by it and augments considerably its points of support in the working class and the garrison. Later, the harmony between the conspirative preparations and the mass action takes place almost automatically. The Second Congress of the Soviets is fixed for November. All our preceding agitation was to lead to the seizure of power by the Congress. Thus, the overturn was adapted in advance to November 7. This fact was well known and understood by the enemy. Kerensky and his councillors could not fail to make efforts to consolidate themselves, to however small an extent, in Petrograd for the decisive moment. Also, they stood in need of shipping out of the capital the most revolutionary sections of the garrison. We on our part profited by this attempt by Kerensky in order to make it the source of a new conflict which had a decisive importance. We openly accused the Kerensky government-our accusation subsequently found a written confirmation in an official document-of having planned the removal of a third of the Petrograd garrison not out of military considerations but for the purpose of counter-revolutionary combinations. This conflict bound us still more closely to the garrison and put before the latter a well-defined task, to support the Soviet Congress fixed for November 7. And since the government insisted-even if in a feeble enough manner-that the garrison be sent off, we created in the Petrograd Soviet, already in our hands, a Revolutionary War Committee, on the pretext of verifying the military reasons for the governmental plan.

Thus we had a purely military organ, standing at the head of the Petrograd garrison, which was in reality a legal organ of armed insurrection. At the same time we designated (communist) commissars in all the military units, in the military stores, etc. The clandestine military organization accomplished specific technical tasks and furnished the Revolutionary War Committee with fully trustworthy militants for important military tasks. The essential work concerning the preparation, the realization and the armed insurrection took place openly, and so methodically and naturally that the bourgeoisie, led by Kerensky, did not clearly understand what was taking place under their very eyes. (In Paris, the proletariat understood only on the following day that it had been really victorious-a victory which it had not, moreover, deliberately sought-that it was master of the situation. In Petrograd, it was the contrary. Our party, basing itself on the workers and the garrison, had already seized the power, the bourgeoisie passed a fairly tranquil night and learned only on the following morning that the helm of the country was in the hands of its gravedigger.)

As to strategy, there were many differences of opinion in our party.

A part of the Central Committee declared itself, as is known, against the taking of power, believing that the moment had not yet arrived, that Petrograd was detached from the rest of the country, the proletariat from the peasantry, etc.

Other comrades believed that we were not attributing sufficient importance to the elements of military complot. One of the members of the Central Committee demanded in October the surrounding of the Alexandrine Theater where the Democratic Conference was in session, and the proclamation of the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the party. He said: in concentrating our agitation as well as our preparatory military work for the moment of the Second Congress, we are showing our plan to the adversary, we are giving him the possibility of preparing himself and even of dealing us a preventive blow. But there is no doubt that the attempt at a military complot and the surrounding of the Alexandrine Theater would have been a fact too alien to the development of the events, that it would have been an event disconcerting to the masses. Even in the Petrograd Soviet, where our faction dominated, such an enterprise, anticipating the logical development of the struggle, would have provoked great disorder at that moment, above all among the garrison where there were hesitant and not very trustful regiments, primarily the cavalry regiments. It would have been much easier for Kerensky to crush a complot unexpected by the masses than to attack the garrison consolidating itself more and more on its positions: the defense of its inviolability in the name of the future Congress of the Soviets. Therefore the majority of the Central Committee rejected the plan to surround the Democratic Conference and it was right. The conjuncture was very well judged: the armed insurrection, almost without bloodshed, triumphed exactly on the date, fixed in advance and openly, for the convening of the Second Soviet Congress.

This strategy cannot, however, become a general rule, it requires specific conditions. Nobody believed any longer in the war with the Germans, and the less revolutionary soldiers did not want to quit Petrograd for the front. And even if the garrison as a whole was on the side of the workers for this single reason, it became stronger in its point of view to the extent that Kerensky's machinations were revealed. But this mood of the Petrograd garrison had a still deeper cause in the situation of the peasant class and in the development of the imperialist war. Had there been a split in the garrison and had Kerensky obtained the possibility of support from a few regiments, our plan would have failed. The elements of purely military complot (conspiracy and great speed of action) would have prevailed. It would have been necessary, of course, to choose another moment for the insurrection.

The Commune also had the complete possibility of winning even the peasant regiments, for the latter had lost all confidence and all respect for the power and the command. Yet it undertook nothing towards this end. The fault here is not in the relationships of the peasant and the working classes, but in the revolutionary strategy.

What will be the situation in this regard in the European countries in the present epoch? It is not easy to foretell anything on this score. Yet, with the events developing slowly and the bourgeois governments exerting all their efforts to utilize past experiences, it may be foreseen that the proletariat, in order to attract the sympathies of the soldiers, will have to overcome a great and well organized resistance at a given moment. A skillful and well~ timed attack on the part of the revolution will then be necessary. The duty of the party is to prepare itself for it. That is just why it must maintain and develop its character of a centralized organization, which openly guides the revolutionary movement of the masses and is at the same time a clandestine apparatus of the armed insurrection.

The question of the electibility of the command was one of the reasons of the conflict between the National Guard and Thiers. Paris refused to accept the command designated by Thiers. Varlin subsequently formulated the demand that the command of the National Guard, from top to bottom, ought to be elected by the National Guardsmen themselves. That is where the Central Committee of the National Guard found its support.

This question must he envisaged from two sides: from the political and the military sides, which are interlinked but which should be distinguished. The political task consisted in purging the National Guard of the counter¬revolutionary command. Complete electibility was the only means for it, the majority of the National Guard being composed of workers and revolutionary petty bourgeois. And in addition, the motto "electibility of the command", being extended also to the infantry, Thiers would have been deprived at a single stroke of his essential weapon, the counterrevolutionary officers. In order to realize this plan, a party organization, having its men in all the military units, was required. In a word, electibility in this ease had as its immediate task not to give good commanders to the batallions, but to liberate them from commanders devoted to the bourgeoisie. Electibility served as a wedge for splitting the army into two parts, along class lines. Thus did matters occur with its in the period of Kerensky, above all on the eve of October.

But the liberation of the army from the old commanding apparatus inevitably involves the weakening of organizational cohesion and the diminution of combative power. As a rule, the elected command is pretty weak from the technico-military standpoint and with regard to the maintenance of order and of discipline. Thus, at the moment when the army frees itself from the old counterrevolutionary command which oppressed it, the question arises of giving it a revolutionary command capable of fulfilling its mission. And this question can by no means be resolved by simple elections. Before wide masses of soldiers acquire the experience of well choosing and selecting commanders, the revolution will be beaten by the enemy which is guided in the choice of its command by the experience of centuries. The methods of shapeless democracy (simple electibility) must be supplemented and to a certain extent replaced by measures of selection from above. The revolution must create an organ composed of experienced, reliable organizers, in which one can have absolute confidence, give it full powers to choose, designate and educate the command. If particularism and democratic autonomism are extremely dangerous to the proletarian revolution in general, they are ten times more dangerous to the army. We saw that in the tragic example of the Commune.

The Central Committee of the National Guard drew its authority from democratic electibility. At the moment when the Central Committee needed to develop to the maximum its initiative in the offensive, deprived of the leadership of a proletarian party, it lost its head, hastened to transmit its powers to the representatives of the Commune which required a broader democratic basis. And it was a great mistake in that period to play with elections. But once the elections had been held and the Commune brought together, ft was necessary to concentrate everything in the Commune at a single blow and to have it create an organ possessing real power to reorganize the National Guard. This was not the case. By the side of the elected Commune there remained the Central Committee; the elected character of the latter gave it a political authority thanks to which it was able to compete with the Commune. But at the same time that deprived it of the energy and the firmness necessary in the purely military questions which, after the organization of the Commune, justified its existence. Electibility, democratic methods, are but one of the instruments in the hands of the proletariat and its party. Electibility can in no wise be a fetish, a remedy for all evils. The methods of electibility must be combined with those of appointments. The power of the Commune came from the elected National Guard. But once created, the Commune should have reorganized with a strong hand the National Guard, from top to bottom, given it reliable leaders and established a regime of very strict discipline. The Commune did not do this, being itself deprived of a powerful revolutionary directing center. It too was crushed.

We can thus thumb the whole history of the Commune, page by page, and we will find in it one single lesson: a strong party leadership is needed. More than any other proletariat has the French made sacrifices for the revolution. But also more than any other has it been duped. Many times has the bourgeoisie dazzled it with all the colors of republicanism, of radicalism, of socialism, so as always to fasten upon it the fetters of capitalism. By means of its agents, its lawyers and its journalists, the bourgeoisie has put forward a whole mass of democratic, parliamentary, autonomist formulae which are nothing but impediments on the feet of the proletariat, hampering its forward movement.

The temperament of the French proletariat is a revolutionary lava. But this lava is now covered with the ashes of skepticism result of numerous deceptions and disenchantments. Also, the revolutionary proletarians of France must be severer towards their party and unmask more pitilessly any non-conformity between word and action. The French workers have need of an organization, strong as steel, with leaders controlled by the masses at every new stage of the revolutionary movement.

How much time will history afford us to prepare ourselves? We do not know. For fifty years the French bourgeoisie has retained the power in its hands after having elected the Third Republic on the bones of the Communards. Those fighters of '71 were not lacking in heroism. What they lacked was clarity in method and a centralized leading organization. That is why they were vanquished. Half a century elapsed before the proletariat of France could pose the question of avenging the death of the Communards. But this time, the action will be firmer, more concentrated. The heirs of Thiers will have to pay the historic debt in full.

Leon TROTSKY

In Honor Of Women’s History Month- In Nana Kamkov’s Time- For All The Red Emmas Of The Bolshevik Revolution

In Honor Of  Women’s History Month- In Nana Kamkov’s Time- For All The Red Emmas Of The Bolshevik Revolution

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell  

Frank Jackman was not sure where or when he first heard the term “Red Emma” applied to the old- time revolutionary women who came of age around the turn of the 20^th century and who blossomed in the time of the Russian revolution, particularly its Bolshevik phase and of the time of the defense of the revolution in the few year period of the civil war against the national and international White Guards which only ended in 1921. He did know that Emma Goldman the old bomb-throwing (at least in her mind) firebrand anarchist and early defender (and early non-defender) of the Bolshevik experiment bore that sobriquet and so that might have been the genesis of the term but in any case here is the story, or really sketch of a story since a lot was unknown about her exploits, of one such Red Emma, Nana Kamkov, who held her own in the dark days of the Russian revolution of the eve of the decisive battle for Kazan… 

Nana Kamkov’s name first became known to revolutionary history indirectly through her membership in the remnants of a red peasant brigade fighting the Whites in the Russian Civil War around 1919 , a bare platoon at that point whose core were five peasant soldiers from Omsk who had been conscripted and fought together for the Czar in the disastrous World War I battles, gone home at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, farmed their newly Soviet-provided land, were subsequently dispossessed of that land by Orlov the previous owner when the White Guards came through Omsk , and in reaction they had joined the Reds in 1919 to get that land back. After several engagements crisscrossing Central Russia they, the remnant anyhow, found themselves in soon to be besieged Kazan. Nana had been assigned to their unit in the crush of organizational tangles preparing for the defense of Kazan. Nana had also been caught inside Kazan at a time when that locale was being besieged by White Guard forces, particularly the feared Czech Legion that was running amok from Siberia to the Urals in their attempts to get home. Previously Nana’s story, the story of a mere slip of girl of sixteen, had been submerged as part of  the story of this unit, a unit now led by one of the peasant soldiers, Vladimir Suslov, but further research found that she deserved, more than deserved,  additional recognition in her own right        

Yes, Nana Kamkov, deserved  a better fate that to written off as some play thing for some loutish peasant boy, Grunsha  Zanoff by name, no matter how Red Army brave he was just that moment and no matter how peasant handsome he was, and he was, to Nana’s eyes. Nana had come off the land as a child, land in Omsk and as fate would have it also Orlov’s land, when after the last revolution, the one in 1905, the government encouraged capitalist exploitation of the land in order to break down the backward-looking peasant communes. Her parents had abandoned the land and had travelled to live in Kazan and her father had set up shop as a locksmith, a good one. Nana had gone school and had been an outstanding student if somewhat socially backward, she had not been like the other girls boy-crazy, although she confessed in one girlish moment to a classmate that she thought some Prince Charming would see her on the Kazan streets, be immediately smitten by her purposeful carriage and carry her off to some golden palace but that was just a moment’s thought.  Nana though desperately wanted to become an engineer although the family resources precluded such a fate.  

One day in the summer of 1917 at the height of the revolutionary fervor she ran across a Bolshevik agitator in the central square of Kazan (later killed in Kiev fighting off some White Guards in that location) who told her, young impressionable her, aged fourteen, no more, that if the Soviets survived she would be able to pursue her engineering career, hell, the Bolsheviks would encourage it.

From that time Nana had been a single-minded Red Guard soldier performing many dangerous tasks (involving setting off explosives, some espionage work and so on, the specifics unfortunately have been lost despite further inquiry) until the Whites threatened Kazan and she was trapped in the city and had joined Vladimir’s remnants as a result of various organizational tangles. And there she spied Grunsha among his soldiers, loutish, foolish Grunsha, although handsome she admitted. Perhaps it was the time of her time, perhaps she still had a little foolish schoolgirl notion to be with a man, to be a woman, just in case things didn’t work out and she was killed, or worse, executed but one cold night she snuggled up to the sleeping Grunsha and that was that. And she was not sorry although she blushed, blushed profusely when Grunsha’s comrades from home would see them together and knowingly laugh they knew had happened. She had thereafter taken him under her wing and was teaching him to read and to think about things, big idea things, how to work that land back in Omsk better, more scientifically, just in case they weren’t killed, or worse executed. Practical young woman, very practical. And so young Nana entered the red pantheon, and maybe she would drag young Grunsha along too.

Just as she was instructing Grunsha in some Gogol short story a messenger came to their line, a messenger from the river in front of Kazan, from the wind- swept Volga. The message said that Trotsky himself , Trotsky of the phantom armored train rushing to this and that front, seemingly everywhere at the same time, a man that put fear in the hearts of whites and reds alike, had decided to fight and die before Kazan if necessary to save the revolution, to save their precious land. Vladimir and his comrades, including our Red Emma, Red Emma who if the truth be told despite her tender years of sweet sixteen was the best soldier of the lot, and should have been the commissar except those lumpish peasants would not have listened to her, reaffirmed their blood oath. They were not sure of Lenin, thinking him a little too smart, and maybe he had something up his sleeve, maybe he was just another Jew, he looked the part with that bald head of his, but stout-hearted Trotsky, if he was willing to die then what else could they do but stand. If they must die they would die in defense of Kazan, and maybe just maybe somebody would hear of their story, the story of five peasant boys and a pretty red-hearted city girl as brave as they, and lift their heads and roar back too.     

And so young Nana entered the red pantheon, and maybe she would drag young Grunsha along too...

And hence this Women’s History Month contribution.